This is the first of a cycle of New Mobility Advisory Briefs in the "Reinventing Transport in Cities: 2008 - 2012" program. The Briefs are examining in depth a selection of promising but complex approaches to achieving major improvements in terms of environment, life quality, and economic impacts on cities in a very short time frame (two to four years).
This first Brief, and the multi-part support program behind it, has specifically been prepared to advise considering cities, public authorities and agencies around the world as to how best to go about screening, planning and implementing a city/public bike system of their own. The report opens with an overview of the broader strategic underpinnings and process that the city of Paris and the teams behind the Greening of Paris agenda have engaged over the last two years as a leading example, and from there moves on to provide in-depth background on the history and fast-breaking process of city bike developments world-wide (of which there are many with almost as many variations).
Against this firm background the report then in its second part reaches much further back to consider how such a transformative project can fit into the larger new mobility and sustainability framework of your city.
Closing annexes identify the main competing suppliers and provide project updates and contact details on both them, and listing a number of individual consultants and groups with strong credentials in the various areas involved.
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This Brief takes as its point of departure the new Paris Vélib' city bike project, nothing more nor less than the latest, largest and most heavily publicized city bike system in the world. As a result of heavy international media coverage over the last year, cities around the world are lining up to find out about the Paris example, how it works and what kinds of impacts it is getting.
In the face of this explosion of interest in cities around the world, this Brief has been prepared to inform mayors, civic leaders, public interest groups, and active citizens who have heard about the project and would like to know a bit more about it. Possibly with a view to implementing something like it in their own city. It is specifically a strategic planning guide intent on laying the necessary broad base for your successful future project.
But as the report points out, the Vélib' implementation, while extremely appealing in itself, is in fact is part of a broader movement: free or nearly free public bicycles in cities. And that considering cities will do well to look at and understand the pretty wide range of available technologies and approaches available to do the job. Which are covered in detail here.
Finally, as the report points out, there is a lot more to taking full advantage of this exceptional opportunity than just willy-nilly getting a bunch of new bikes out on the street. If innovative projects of this kind are to do their full job in the push toward more sustainable and livable cities, they need to be seen, understood and integrated into the city's overall mobility strategy and multi-level service package. Carefully prepared, well implemented city bike projects can thus work to create a significant pattern break with past transportation practices, and can indeed set off a new wave of innovation and motility choices.
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While you can print and read it on paper, the full report has actually been laid out to function best as a hypertext document. The various sections make their points, and then lead the busy reader direct to documents and sources that are more comprehensive and eventually, since many of them are being updated, more current. The extensive Annexes provide further background information and tips for planning and implementing your future system
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| The City Bike explosion: 1968 - 2008 : |
When a group of young people got together in the late sixties in Amsterdam and decided to take a couple of thousand of old bikes, paint them white and leave them on the street for anyone to take for a ride in the city, little notice was taken internationally, other than to laugh at what was to all clearly an impossibly idealistic, even stupid and childish project. And when after half a year most of the cycles disappeared or were found floating in the city's canals, it was clear to all the critics that this one just one more failed crazed sixties spoof. Nothing to learn from there. Eh?
And when six years later in 1974 the pioneering mayor of the small French city of La Ro-chelle, Michel Crépeau (later to be one of the first French Ministers of Environment) created the Vélos Jaunes (Yellow Bikes) city bike project , this excited little interest beyond the city limits. Although today, a full generation later, the Yellow Bikes are still on the street with 350 bikes and 150 km of protected cycling, and now about to launch a major expansion.)
Nor did many cities in the world sit up and take notice when the city of Rennes in Northern France entered into a partnership with an American outdoor advertizing group, Clear Chan-nel, and put a hundred free bikes on the street back in 1998. Which since has expanded to 200 cycles and 25 stations, and has found an important part of that city's mobility system.
Or four years later when the German Rail company teamed with Berlin in 2002 to start up a system which eventually grew to more than 1700 bikes. And which today provides free city-wide two wheeled transport to people living in Frankfurt, Cologne, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe, and with more cities and new technology in the pipeline.
Looking backward it can now be seen that it was the Vélo'v project in Lyons that really began to raise a few eyebrows when they leap-frogged to more than to thousand bikes and a couple of hundred stations in 2005. It began to be understood by those who were looking that something important was getting underway.
But it was when the Paris Vélib' project leapt onto the world stage in July 2007 starting up with 20,600 bicycles and no less than 1451 stations, that the world really woke up.
And if that were not enough almost in tandem a similar project, this time by Clear Channel again, spring up in Barcelona with a gameplan that is aiming at six thousand cycles and some 400 stations.
Followed quickly by Rome with a second 20,000 bike system now in the works. And Chicago. And San Francisco. And Philadelphia. And Vancouver. And Toronto, And Montreal. Etc. etc.
Apparently something is going on.
Check out the action (as per 1 Feburary 2008).
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| 21st century automobility at your service |
The idea of a shared "pick up and leave it" bicycle is not a new one. For many years it was the best and fastest way to get around Cambridge and Oxford. But the granddaddy of city bikes as we know them today was the original (in all sense of the word) White Bicycle project as implemented in Amsterdam by the provocative Dutch innovator Luud Schimmelpennink and his collaborators back in 1968. And even if most of these free white bicycles ended up stolen or in a canal after a couple of months, the Amsterdam project definite opened the way to all you will find here.
Also known variously as White, Yellow or Community Bicycles, Free Bikes, Public Bicycles, Smart Bikes, Public-Use Bicycles (PUBs), and by many other names depending on place and project, shared cycles have been the subject of several hundreds of projects and variants, but only within the last few years have they begun to show the way toward projects and systems which can really function as an important part of a city's daily transportation arrangements.
A "City Bike", as we understand it in 2007, is city-wide public bicycle system, mainly in-tended to serve people living and working in a city for the day to day transport means. You can spot them for sure since they share the following characteristics:
- Offer fully automated service
- Available 24/7.
- Open to all registered users/clients.
- On-street systems (i.e., not garaged or locked up)
- Pick up/drop off at multiple convenient locations within service area
- Free or almost free for very short periods (i.e., half hour or enough for a fast hop).
While mainly intended to serve local population in their daily lives, they are also showing themselves to be a great way to attract tourists to your city and give them easy access in ways that open up the city as never before.
You may want to bear in mind that city bikes as we define them are not "rental bikes". Of course you will find shared bikes available in various permutations to different kinds of groups and sponsors, in national parks, for company employees, etc. But these are closed systems for specific groups and basically available only in off-street locations . A true city bike is available to anybody on the street who steps forward and does what is needed to start to use them.
A City Bike very quickly becomes your preferred automatic choice for getting around in your own city. It is, in fact, a true form of "automobility".
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| How they work and what they do |
The typical, state-of-the-art 2007 city bicycle program. There are a growing number of these projects around, mainly in European cities that are, incidentally, in almost all cases among the leading innovating cities in our sector. All these City Bike projects have in common that they aim to:
- Add a new dimension to urban mobility
- Extend and complete the range of public transport services
- Integrate the options into a seamless multimodal package
- Available on-demand
- For city-length journeys.
The main justification cited for these systems (for they are very much systems) is that they:
- Provide cost-effective on-demand transportation
- Reach out to destinations un- or under-served by other modes of transit
- Require less infrastructure than other modes of transportation
- Are inexpensive to produce and maintain
- Do not add to traffic congestion
- Do not create pollution in their operation
- Improve cycling safety by sharply increasing number of cyclists on the street
- Cut back on theft of personal bicycles
- Provide users with the added benefit of healthy exercise.
One of the common rationales cited by bike programs is that they provide an effective substitute for at least some of the large number of short distance trips made by cars in urban areas, often with only one person in the car. Such trips make poor use of scarce public resources, and of course carry with them a heavy environmental burden.
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| The bottom line for your city |
- City Bikes work! Get the planning right and your project is going to be a success.
- Low cost: Your City Bike project is not going to gut your transport budget.
- High benefits: This is your real bottom line. If you get it right benefits WAY outweigh costs. And this is waht crates your real bottom line.
- Fast on line: Planning and implementation time for a large city may range from one to two years, max. For well prepared smaller cities considerably less.
- High synergies: A well drawn project will provide strong synergies with your public transport and traffic control /restraint programs.. If properly integrated it can provide new levels of access and comfort improvement. And lead to more bike use
- Revitalizing the center: Remember what excessive dependence on cars did to your central city the last time? Well, city bikes provide a means for restoring the center.
- Planning and implementation: Armed with the information and sources you find here, you have in hand the information needed to ensure the success of your project.
- Lots of ways of doing them: And we definitely recommend that you have a close look at all of the available choices.
- Partners: There are a variety of viable partners with whom you can work to ensure the success of your project. (A number of whom are indentified in the Annexes here).
- Going it alone: You can do it, but you will have a lot of homework and partners choices to sort out. This is the harder way. But it may be the best way for you.
- Starting big: If you are seeking high impacts, this is the way to go.
- Starting small? This depends on your ambition level. Experience shows that it's easy enough to organize a small project, but also suggests that in doing so you may not learn all that much about a city-wide project. This is not to discourage start-up pilots for pre-testing and fine tuning at low cost and perturbation, but the overall lessons for the city as a whole may not be that clear.
- Public participation: This is a sine quo non for the success of your project. And it must start from the beginning and go deeply into the fabric of the project.
- Is it cool? It is often said that one of the big problems with public transport is that it has a lousy image. It is, to be technical, not cool. But what is not cool is that gas-guzzling, carbon-spewing SUV of yours. Hey, it's 2007. Riding a bike safely is cool. A lot cooler than even a Prius (which incidentally is not all that cool, green-wise.).
- They advertise your city: A good project is a major calling card for your city. And the earlier you put it into place, the greater this public relations impact.
- And, will it win votes? Get it right and you will be mayor for as long as you want.
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| In closing: Letter to the mayor |
Paris, Monday, 18 December 2007
To: The Mayor, City Council, City Manager (and candidates for any of above posts)
cc: Supporting senior staff, local NGOs, consultants, concerned citizens/groups
Here is what we have concluded after completing the first half year of work behind this policy brief which has from the start been aimed straight at you and your city's leaders:
- You will do well to give a careful look at the idea of creating a city bike program and putting this "new technology" to work in your city in the near future.
- All of the key pieces and information needed for doing this right are now in place and readily available to you.
- We recommend that every city and community have a careful look at how they might best handle this largely unexpected opportunity. The indispensable first step will be to check out point by point your local cycling environment checklist. Once you have had a good look at that and see that you may have a possible fit, we recommend that your people start to dig deeper
- You will do well to be fully aware of past experience, pitfalls and limitations, (And the report and its many extensions and references should serve you as a good starting place to acquire this necessary knowledge.)
- We encourage you to give careful thought to alternative ways to plan, finance and deliver your best service. The Paris, Lyons, Barcelona, etc. projects are interesting ones -- but they ar eonly some of the options that you should be looking at.
- Your city's, and your, personal commitment to sustainable development? If it's not there, your project has little chance for real success
One of the most interesting and useful things that can come out of your study of such a path-breaking innovation for your city, is the way in which, by its extreme and in many ways unfamiliar innovation, it forces you to rethink the entire transportation problematique of your city in much broader terms. This means that once you have planned and put in that terrific new city bike system, your program of problem-solving, innovation and adaptation in the sector will only be getting started. Success has this way of transforming us all. But this time you will be looking at it with an entirely different set of premises
As you will see these innovations and approaches can be made to interlock and work together to move toward a new mobility environment for your city. So you will do well to consider each of these great ideas one by one on their individual merits -- and in parallel to see further how they be fitted together and reinforce each other, and in the process encouraging and reinforcing yet other kinds of innovations and adaptations as needed to give your city the best mobility system and fit with the opportunities and constraints of this very different 21st century.
We have no hesitation in making these recommendations.
Eric Britton
Managing Director
EcoPlan International
Europe: 8/10 rue Joseph Bara, 75006 Paris, France. T: +331 4326 1323
USA: 9440 Readcrest Dr. Los Angeles, CA 90210. T: +1 310 601-8468
